If you don’t know your audience, you can’t produce engaging content. Your posts are likely to be boring.
Your content should be like a conversation between you and your target audience. If they’re a mystery to you, your conversation is going to be pretty one-sided. Understand your audience is a major part of creating a content strategy. In fact, it is not possible to create a successful strategy without knowing who your audience is!
Focus on the Consumer
There is a thing in the marketing world known as “you focused”. You focused means that your content should always focus on the person you are talking to. It should address their interests, answer their questions, and give them advice that they can use immediately.
After all, the purpose of your content is to capture the attention of your audience.
When you don’t know what they want, you will end up talking about the things you want. Your content will be about your products, your interests, and what you think your audience needs to hear.
Your content will be “me focused,” and that will lose your audience’s attention fast.
Create a Persona
Before you create any content, you should create an audience persona. An audience persona is simply a composite sketch of the typical person who reads your content. Based on your analytics, you should create an imaginary person, a Mr Average, who you can address all your content to.
It is much easier to write for a single person than a bunch of statistics. That’s the beauty of a persona, you can come up with endless content ideas when you have a single individual in mind.
Let’s say that your persona is named Jack. You can ask yourself, what does Jack like to read? Where does Jack like to go on holiday? How much money does Jack spend on Shopping? You get the idea.
The more detailed you make your persona, the more effective it is for generating content.
Now, suppose you have a team of content producers working for you. How do you make sure that their posts, videos, and podcasts stay consistent?
The answer, of course, is to use a persona. A detailed, well-constructed, persona will help you coordinate all your content and keep it engaging.
Don’t just make up your persona, though. That’s a trap that a lot of beginners fall into. You must create your persona based on real data from surveys, market research, or industry reports.
A persona serves as a focal point for all that data.
If you have a large business, it’s a good idea to create two to three personas. They should represent different demographics such as men, women, and children.
Don’t create too many, though. If you have more than three you run the risk of having too much information. That defeats the purpose of using personas.
Write to Your Audience’s Wants and Needs
Once you have a persona prepared, you can start generating compelling content. The trick is to address your audience’s wants and needs.
Needs are the things that are essential. If you’re addressing business people, their needs might be things like better business software, printers, stationary, and so on. Needs are not very interesting, but we all have them.
Most of your content will focus on wants. Wants are things that aren’t essential but make us feel good. We want a bigger car, or a better suit, or the latest phone. Wants to capture people’s attention.
When creating content, focus on your persona and ask what are their wants and needs?
Let’s take our persona, Jack. Suppose we’ve done our market research and determined that Jack is a 40-year-old salesman.
He drives a modest car, earns 60k, and has a mortgage. He has a wife and two kids, and his kids are currently in school. His last vacation was seven years ago.
That is what the data tells you your average audience member is like. You would normally go into more detail than that, but it’ll do for an example.
Jack’s needs are things like paying off his mortgage and putting his kids through school. His wants are getting a bigger salary, going on vacation, and maybe getting a fancy car.
From this, you can see the type of content your audience will engage with.
Write posts about increasing your salary or financing a new car. Make videos on great vacation spots and how you can afford to go there.
If you can address Jack’s needs as well, then your content will be both engaging and useful.
Don’t just write about needs though, as I said, it’s boring. You always lead with wants. Most people don’t even know what they need, so you won’t capture anyone’s attention by creating content around it.
If your content is both interesting and useful, because you lead with wants and address needs, then you have a winning combination.